At the NAB Conference from April 11th to April 16th, Adobe announced a new app, coming to Adobe Creative Cloud members.

Adobe Character Animator does just what it says it will do. You can use pre-created characters that appear to come with the app, or you can create your characters using Photoshop or Illustrator and animate them. I believe I’m initially most impressed with the facial recognition and animation activation, which takes prompts directly from your webcam.

Of course, version 1 of anything will have it’s issues – but this looks really promising!!!

This past week, Adobe announced a new version of Acrobat Pro. It’s called DC (DC stands for “Document Cloud” and the interface is VERY different from what we’ve been used to (the upgrade to X from version 9 was very significant, but this one’s a whole different ballgame!)

With this version, Adobe puts a great deal of effort and emphasis on working with PDFs on computers and IOS and Android devices. It’s fully 64 bit, and it’s system requirements require newer Operating Systems, browsers, and more.

One GIANT CAVEAT! The installation of DC will uninstall your previous versions of Adobe Acrobat Pro, including any customizations and plugins you’ve made. The only way to protect your customizations is to back them up, prior to installing DC. On Windows computers, there is NO way to run both version together (previous installations didn’t support it, but did allow it). On the Mac, several people have managed to successfully install DC and continue to run XI without problem – although those people are few and far between.

The app looks pretty cool – but do beware of the notes above. If you ever want to go back to XI, you’d have to uninstall DC and reinstall XI. From my personal experience so far, this is also the actual case for 99% of Mac users as well.

Up until today, I was under NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) to not reveal what’s coming up to MANY of my student’s favorite Adobe Apps – but today, with the announcement at NAB, all may be revealed. In fact, Adobe themselves revealed what’s to come to Adobe Premiere Pro (oh, my goodness, what they’re doing!), After Effects, InDesign, Illustrator, Flash, Muse, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and Audition!